Friday, March 14, 2008

I had the recent displeasure of sampling a bottle of Anheuser-Busch's Wild Blue Blueberry Lager. If someone asks you to try this beer, you can no longer consider them a friend.

This beer could be used to end the war in Iraq.

No...the Geneva Convention won't allow the use of this beer in combat against humans.

Now, before I am criticized by the masses for simpoly being biased against a "microbrewed" beer that's actually from AB, I am always willing to try something a brewery wants to market, even the big ones. Including AB. Their "cask-aged" ale is actually a decent specimen and at least drinkable. This beer, however, was undrinkable.

You may ask aloud: how undrinkable was it? Well, let me tell you. My wife, 7 months pregnant with twins, has done noting but crave...sometimes tearfully crave...the beers I carelessly and callously flaunt in front of her. She sipped this beer, and literally recoiled in horror. So desperate for beer is she that she caught a whiff of someone's Michelob Ultra and nearly went into fits of drooling desire, and she recoiled in horror at a mere sip of this...this...monstrosity.

Served in a 12-oz brown bottle with a twist-off cap (should have been my first warning) with a pic of an ugly blue dog kicking a blueberry. Ha! Looks funny. I bet the beer has real moxie, just like that crazy, messy dog kickin' that blueberry. Marketing genius, I tell you.

The beer pured into my glass...purple. Not dark brown with purple or blue hues. Purple. With a lavender head, thin, which dissipated quickly. I fouled a perfectly good beer glass with this foul purple liquid. How purple? Kool-Aid purple. Mrs. Smitty said "Wow. That's purple. You sure you want to drink it?"

With great trepidation, I lifted the glass towards my nose with a shaking hand. I smelled with the kind of a smelling reflex used for when one of your friends says "Oh Jesus dude...oh God...you gotta smell this." All I got was a noseful of artificial blueberry flavoring. Not real blueberry flavoring. The kind reserved for Jolly ranchers and bubblegum. I sniffed and sniffed, trying to find a speck, a mere hint, of a standard lager aroma; caramel malt, graininess. I got nothin. No hops. Alllllll artificial blueberry.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, Mrs. Smitty, my therpaist and the ER doc, I decided to hoist the glass to my lips and take a sip with wild abandon. Had this not been labeled as a "lager" I would have mistaken this for a blueberry martini. There was no discernable beer taste at all. Sip after gut-wrenching, tear-inducing sip produced no noble hops, no grain, no malt. I anticipated each sip in the same fashion that one might use to anticipate tasting month-old milk in their fridge. All I got as my reward for each painful quaff was a mouthful of fake blueberry and a slight alcohol bite. If I wanted to drink something like this in a bar, I'd order a martini. But seeing as how I like beer, I felt cheated.

At the end of the day, this is a malt liquor with blueberry concentrate added. Save yourself the trouble and go buy a 40 of King Cobra, a can of blueberry concentrate, find a pitcher, pour and mix. I'd have felt better about myself, after trying this atrocity, if I'd have bought Boon's Farm.

I even felt bad about pouring thios beer down the drain not because I was dumping a beer (as this is clearly a misrepresentation....this is not beer), but because I didn't want my drain and garbage disposal to suffer the same fate as my mouth.

It's called "Wild Blue Blueberry Lager for gods sake and you still drank it?

To me, you brought this upon yourself.

I cannot imagine that even the greatest brew masters of our generation could ever come up a good combination of beer and blueberries. Therefore A.B. must be incapable.

I don’t really like fruity flavors in my beer. It just has never worked for me. Cherry Wheat? No, I will pass. I can deal with the naturally-occurring fruity flavors in many beers, but additives just seem wrong. It’s like Dr. Frankenstein became a brew master and came up with some blasphemous concoction.

OH you poor poor poor man who had to imbibe such a poor poor poo poo example of "beer". Like you said, this is not, and shall never be in my book, beer. I've had this, and had basically the exact same reaction you did.

On a similar vein, I tried Bell's Cherry Stout a few weeks back, and was disappointed. Very disappointed. Kid-discovering-there-is-no-Santa-Claus disappointed. I love Larry Bell, and I love Stout. But this stuff was just too much for me. Like the combination of marichino cherry juice, hard alcohol, and my anus.

Steve: A passable blueberry ale is Blucreek Bluebarry Ale. Passable in the sense that I can drink it and not want to die. Truth is, I've ben looking for a blueberry ale that is well-balanced and highlghts both beer and berry qualities. I have not really found a shining example yet.

Mike: Boys! We have 1 boy already...and twin boys on the way. A house full of boys.

Never had it before. Tell you what, Mike. If there is a Founders, Michigan Brewing, Khuennen's, Dragonmead, Bells, or New Holland that you want, I'll trade you for some. Let me know. I'll ship you what you want, and you ship me some of that.

BTW, my wife loves Wild Blue. We live in West Virginia and do to the crappy beer laws in this state, we can not buy anything over 6% ABV, and Wild Blue is 8%. So we have to drive to Pennsylvania to get it. I currently have 5 Cases of it at my house.

My wife is not really a beer drinker, so that explains why she likes it so well. Myself, I will have one every now and then, usually only when I am out of everything else.

Well, I'm pretty late to this article, but I nearly choked on my honey nut cheerios (which I am eating out of the bag) while reading this. I'm not kidding...tears were streaming down my face. This may be because I've had 5 beers already, and have now resorted to drinking an Assandcatfood "lager" which I regretably bought the other night.

Couldn't agree more...this stuff is garbage...but I'm trying to keep the buzz going, and I'm all out of vanilla extract. I have to wonder if it will soon be taken off the shelves and be relabeled as Blueberry Smirnoff Ice.

If you want a glorious bluberry ale, Wachusett Bluberry Ale, out of Westminster MA., is the one.It's glorious.

I live in Hawaii, and almost want to move back to MA. just to have access to it.

Well, I'm pretty late to this article, but I nearly choked on my honey nut cheerios (which I am eating out of the bag) while reading this. I'm not kidding...tears were streaming down my face. This may be because I've had 5 beers already, and have now resorted to drinking an Assandcatfood "lager" which I regretably bought the other night.

Couldn't agree more...this stuff is garbage...but I'm trying to keep the buzz going, and I'm all out of vanilla extract. I have to wonder if it will soon be taken off the shelves and be relabeled as Blueberry Smirnoff Ice.

If you want a glorious bluberry ale, Wachusett Bluberry Ale, out of Westminster MA., is the one.It's glorious.

I live in Hawaii, and almost want to move back to MA. just to have access to it.

Well,it is rather atrocious,but it does something marvelous when you chase it behind Jack Daniels! I cannot explain why but it allows zero burn. I know my girlfriend is weird but she showed me this trickwith some moonshine with battery acid added "for kick" and it took the edge right off. I tried it with Jack and it really does something for it.However it cannot be consumed alone.

This beer really isn't that bad...it tastes kind of like grape soda, and for an 8% beverage its smooth...and sweet, and doesn't taste like alcohol or beer at all....it's not artificially flavored like the previous review states either...according to the listed ingredients....VA